Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Disenchantment with Udall over Drug Company Donation?

In what might mark the beginning of a trend, a left-wing blogger notes disapprovingly that the 2006 re-election campaign of Boulder liberal Rep. Mark Udall, now a Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado, took money from big drug companies. She writes:

We are seeing the housing market go bust, jobs lost to outsourcing, and our senior citizens, who are on fixed incomes, struggling to keep up with the rise in food prices and medicine.

On the other hand, who is NOT struggling? The drug companies, of course!...

...[A]s I have traveled around the district, many senior citizens have told me about the great difficulty they face in buying prescription drugs. Hospital administrators tell me that the single largest expenditure increase in their budget is on prescription drugs. Insurer's spending on drugs has shot up from $40 billion in 1996 to an estimated $118 billion this year. And almost four years ago, I released reports which shows that seniors in my district who don't have drug coverage pay twice as much for the medicines as do people who do have coverage.

Currently, Medicare does not cover outpatient prescription drug costs. We have an obligation to our nation's seniors to provide them with the lifesaving treatments they need and deserve. No senior should be faced with the choice of buying food, paying the electric bill or buying critical life saving medicines.

Typical Democrat rhetoric, to be sure. But if Udall is also taking campaign money from drug companies, shouldn't the base of his party's support in Colorado be concerned about which side of his mouth he is talking from? In this case, confusion may turn to disenchantment.

The Mark Udall is Not a Moderate Scoreboard

On an ongoing basis, Schaffer v Udall tallies mentions of Rep. Mark Udall in the liberal blogosphere and mainstream media to provide readers a fair and thorough accounting of where the Democratic Senate candidate fits on the political spectrum. Comments by blogs, pundits, and politicians of a conservative persuasion are excluded from the tally.